When Change is Looming

I want to do transitions better. A few things that are helping.

A few weeks ago I wrote that I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to summer. Yet, here we are. School will start again soon, my oldest child will begin their senior year. The change is coming, like it or not.

I’ve been having this growing sense in me that life is entering into a stage of transition. Partly, this is due to the torpid swirl of almost three years now of COVID in China, and the changes it has wrought for our family and work. There is nothing on the table for us in the way of leaving right now, but the circumstances make it feel like change could be lurking around the corner, ready to spring upon us at any moment. It’s more like something is in the air, a rumbling felt in the distance, and you carry on, unsure if whatever is making the sound will come into view or eventually dissipate.

So there is that.

But more clearly, I know that change is coming to our family. Our oldest son will be graduating next summer, (and then our second the year following!) and we will be sending him off in some capacity, leaving a big hole in the makeup of our life together.

I could get real sad about that. My mother said a few months ago that she sensed I was already grieving his exit, eighteen months out. I thought about that, and realized that I don’t want to be someone who lives in grief over life transitions. This is not to say that I don’t want to name and recognize the loss, but that I don’t want it to take over and be the driving force

I read this parenting advice someone shared in a post, from one mom of graduates to another. She said in essence: Don’t obsess over all the “lasts.”

“There will be more dinners, more vacations, more movie nights as they grow up. Parenting and family life continues even when they move out, even though it looks different.”

That helped me.

And in a larger sense, it made me think that this is also a way to move into a season of transition, whatever that may entail. Don’t obsess about the lasts. Don’t obsess about the loss.

I’ve noticed that thinking about change and transition tends to make me look backward and both wish I could hang on to what I have, as well as worry about how well I’ve done. As though moving on is also a marker, a report card of sorts. With a kid graduating that might look like thinking over all that we’ve done in raising this human—did we do it well or not? With leaving a job, or moving locations, it might look like thinking over all the we gave our efforts to— did it make a difference?

As I see myself reacting in this way, it makes me want to step off the obsession wheel, and take a deep breath. Obsessing isn’t helpful, but maybe reflection is.

Sometimes reflection is difficult for me. I can think long and hard about things, but maybe not always in a way that moves me through the thoughts and into a wider, clearer space. So this week, I’ve tried the practice of these 10 Reflection Questions from Emily P. Freeman. They are meant to help you name the season you have been in, in order to move on to the next one with a sense of where you are. They’re not fancy, or transformative in any profound way. But I needed a tool, and this proved helpful.

I also tried to be honest in my prayers. To say, I’m sad about this thing. I’m worried about this other thing. I want to hear your Voice, I want to go where you lead. I believe there is good in where you take me. And I’m not going to obsess over how well I’ve done. Because you certainly don’t.

When Jesus met Peter after the resurrection, he took aside the man who had followed him so poorly and denied him so easily, and asked him the same question three times: “Do you love me?” It’s hard to know what Peter felt, or what he understood Jesus to be doing. All we know is that as Peter answered the question with “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” Jesus responded to Peter with a calling, in spite of his faithless past. If you love me, keep following me, keep going where I tell you to go.

Not obsessing. Gentle reflecting. Let’s move on.